“It is nice to hear that the Times Supplement on Higher Education has affirmed Stanford’s international pre-eminence as a center of research and teaching in the humanities and arts, a pre-eminence that has also been acknowledged in recent years by other periodicals and national agencies, such as U.S. News and World Report and the National Research Council.  Yet I’m not sure that all of our undergraduates know what riches lie in wait for them in the English Department and our other humanities departments.  They should give us a try.  This spring, Gavin Jones will guide students through four of America’s most beloved novelists: Hemingway, Hurston, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald.  Mark McGurl will explore the literature of the Wasteland from T.S. Eliot to the present.  Franco Moretti will ask why English novelists from Bunyan to Orwell have prized normal heroes.  And I’ll introduce students to the first theater of sex and violence: the Jacobean tragedy of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.  Students who enroll in one of these courses — and these are just the tip of the iceberg — may just find that the Times is right: we offer some of the best teaching and the best research in the humanities available anywhere in the world.  It would be a shame to miss out on that.”

– Prof. Blair Hoxby, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of English

In the Times Higher Education’s most recent rankings, Stanford topped the list of institutions in Arts and Humanities. These rankings were released in October of last year, and yet I wasn’t aware of them until just last week. Thinking recently about what this means for Stanford, for its Arts and Humanities departments, and for the scholars and students who call it their intellectual home, I have had to repress a desire to simply throw my hands up and mutter an expletive to convey that I share what I suspect is a widespread (dis)regard for college rankings and their distortions. I pause, however, when I consider the importance of the mighty Ranking as it functions in discourses about the academy, about education, and especially as it crystallizes the sometimes institutional antipathy about the Arts and Humanities at Stanford.  Continue reading →

The Stanford Theatre Activist Mobilization Project, better known as STAMP, is putting on Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice next week. Director Morielle Stroethoff, ’12, a fellow English major, has set the show in a modern context in the Bay Area.  This week, Cellar Door caught up with Morielle to ask her about her vision of the show and the directing process.

What is your favourite thing about Merchant of Venice? And your least favourite?
Let’s do my favourite first. To me, Merchant of Venice represents a perfect marriage between comedy and drama.  The world of the play is a dark and troubled one, much like our own.  As an audience member, it is hard to watch misunderstanding evolve into cruelty, especially when it happens between characters in whom we see so much of ourselves.  But Shakespeare didn’t write Merchant of Venice purely to push his audiences into asking tough questions about their beliefs, he also wrote it to bring some laughter into this sad world.  A play that probes your thoughts and makes you smile?  I can’t imagine anything better than that.  And Merchant does it so well!  Continue reading →